JAMES PARKER

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The exquisite artifice and lasting weirdoid-ness of Roxy Music Even now, after Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces and Simon Reynolds’s Rip It Up and Start Again , the rock-star-as-vector-of-ideas is still something of a challenge for us.

Steve Martin’s new memoir unlocks the freaky logic of his comedy Martin’s new memoir, Born Standing Up , grants us our best access yet to this remote and brilliant figure — the cool architect of the comedy.

Could be verse: poetry ripped from the headlines Lines upon learning that scientists have recently isolated methane-mitigating microbes in the intestinal lining of the kangaroo, and plan to replicate them in cattle to reduce the emission of “cow-created” greenhouse gas

Philip Pullman ’ s fantasy novels are condemned as a crash course in militant atheism. But one BU professor thinks otherwise. It is a truth now well established that the idea for a series of books about a schoolboy wizard did not , in fact, originate with its author, J.K. Rowling (as she has naively claimed), but was piped up red-hot and stinking from Below.

Bob Dylan? A CIA spy? Wait . . . now it all makes sense. (Or as much sense as his lyrics make, anyway.) I had just removed his hand — gently, I hope — from my knee when the man in the off-white linen suit told me that he was the one who recruited Bob Dylan into the CIA.